Occupy ready to regroup

STOCKTON - The 60-day movement to occupy downtown has reached a pivotal moment.

Kevin Parrish

STOCKTON - The 60-day movement to occupy downtown has reached a pivotal moment.

After two months of off-and-on camping across from City Hall, of confronting city officials - including one notable dustup with City Manager Bob Deis - and of holding up signs to passing motorists, Occupy Stockton is re-evaluating the delivery of its message.

The group of a dozen or so protesters is still bivouacking overnight in the city's core, but they're not saying exactly where and they're no longer as easy to find.

"It felt like people were just hanging around," said Diana Buettner, 52, the group's de facto spokeswoman. "We need to be more active. We're in transition."

She admitted her return to full-time teaching this week at Chavez High School was a factor Tuesday in a smaller group of protesters and a slower start to the day. By noon, five people sat quietly under shade trees.

The group started as an offshoot of the Occupy Wall Street movement and made its Stockton presence semi-permanent at the start of summer. Participants camped in Martin Luther King Jr. Plaza, at first in the shadow of City Hall and more recently at Oak and Center streets across from the Cesar Chavez Central Library. But recently, smaller in numbers, they've made themselves less conspicuous at night.

"We want to change," said Buettner, who has resumed her classroom job teaching American government and English.

In late July, she was involved in a battery complaint against Deis, claiming he intentionally bumped her while she was drawing in chalk on the sidewalk outside City Hall. On Aug. 7, the San Joaquin County district attorney said the contact was "unintentional and inadvertent." No charges were filed.

There was no comment Tuesday from city officials about the Occupy Stockton group's diminished profile.

"It's time to try a different flavor," said Buettner. "We don't want to be part of the problem. We want to build a sense of community and end the divisiveness - in race, in economics, in religion. We want to ramp things up with a different focus."

She said marching in the streets will not be part of the loose-knit organization's future. "That's not us," Buettner said. "The other marches have been by out-of-towners."

She said her role as a community activist has irony.

She is a member of the Stockton-based, all-volunteer Western Farm Workers Association, she teaches at a high school named for activist Cesar Chavez and she had a walk-on role in "Bound for Glory," the 1976 biographical film about Woodie Guthrie and the dust-bowl migration of poor farmers to California.